8/21/2000 @ 12:00AM

Crime Pays!

BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID: $85,000; the James Gang: $40,000; Al Capone: $8,600. No, these are not the rewards posted below their wanted posters. They are current auction prices for their mug shots and other photos of these notorious felons.

Collectors of fine-art photography have fallen in love with bad-guy pictures, and they’re tracking them down with the determination of Eliot Ness. As it turns out, cops and collectors use many of the same criteria to determine the most-wanted: The more heinous the crime, the more money a photo of the perp can command.

“How far-reaching their reputation was, how colorful they were in their own lifetime and how they are considered today in a world that is very icon-conscious–these are the factors that are increasingly important,” says Daile Kaplan, head of the photography department at Swann Galleries, an auction house in New York.

In April Swann sold the photograph that indirectly led to the undoing of Butch and Sundance, setting a new auction record for Western outlaw photos. The vintage print showed The Wild Bunch–Butch and the Sundance Kid, with their confederates Ben Kilpatrick, William Carver and Kid Curry. The story goes that the gang, celebrating a successful bank robbery, sashayed into John Swartz’s photo studio in Fort Worth, Tex. in September 1900 to record their triumph. A copy of the photo, in which gang members all sported brand-new bowler hats, was circulated by the Pinkerton Agency and used to track down Butch and Sundance, who had later fled to Bolivia. Some say the final, glorious shoot-out was the direct result of the gang’s vainglory in the photo studio. The legend helped push the photograph to $85,000.

The price reflects not only the rarity of the print, but the shift in the kinds of collectors pursuing this material. The print had been in the collection of James Harran, a noted expert on the American West, who uncovered images like this one in dusty archives and police vaults. It was bought by Ydessa Hendeles, one of the world’s leading contemporary-art collectors, who maintains her own museum in Toronto.

“It is fascinating to see how we re-create the outlaw over and over again–in daguerreotypes, in legend, then in film and now in postmodernism,” says Richard Sandor, another leading art collector and a board member of the School of Art Institute of Chicago. Next to the Andy Warhols and Cindy Shermans in Sandor’s Chicago home hang the only known portrait of Billy the Kid and a snapshot of Al Capone enjoying a baseball game at Wrigley Field.

“There are more and more people with deep pockets aware of this stuff,” says Swann Galleries’ Kaplan. A postmortem view of Jesse James in his coffin brought $5,060 in 1998. A year later six cartes-de-visite of the James-Younger Gang snagged $39,100. And while the Wild West still leads the crime photo field because the prints are older and rarer, 1930s gangsters are coming on strong. In 1997 Al Capone’s mug shot sold for $8,625, and a press print of Bonnie and Clyde fetched $4,830.

Sociologists looking for the original culprit in this fine-art crime wave finger a single exhibition. Police Pictures: The Photograph as Evidence, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1997, was the first exhibit to present evidentiary photographs as art. The show included daguerreotypes of runaway slaves, a 1934 press photo of George “Baby Face” Nelson on an undertaker’s slab and a bystander cupping Robert Kennedy’s blood-soaked head.

Visitors took away one overriding impression: These pictures looked terrific! Art collectors took notice, too. Even the grisliest images–the Daily News‘ 1928 front-page view of convicted murderer Ruth Snyder in the electric chair, or a Cambodian death squad’s photographic records of their genocide victims–stood up esthetically to the work of contemporary art photographers.

It wasn’t long after the Police Pictures exhibit that crime photos started loitering around well-bred galleries. New York photo dealer Steven Kasher mounted a show of press photographs in 1998, selling images by unknown photographers–such as “Marion Roberts, Ziegfield Girl and Gangster’s Moll” and “Winnie Ruth Judd Nabbed with Blood Dripping from Suitcase,” for $500 to $1,500.

Since then galleries have been making a beeline for the underworld. In Dallas, Burt and Missy Finger’s Photographs Do Not Bend Gallery recently exhibited Scene of the Crime, which includes an unforgettable 1917 press photo titled, “Man Sets Mother-in-Law on Fire in Front of Five Children.” Edwynn Houk Gallery in New York sells Danny Lyon’s photographs of Texas inmates, taken in the late 1960s, for $6,000 to $35,000.

No photographer is as closely associated with crime as the celebrated New York press hound Arthur Fellig, better known as Weegee. The nickname, a play on Ouija board, derives from Weegee’s uncanny knack for arriving at crime scenes ahead of the cops. “Weegee was able to create incredibly charged images by balancing our fear and our fascination with a highly refined photographic style,” says Rick Wester, head of Christie’s photography department.

Christie’s sold Weegee’s “Their First Murder,” a scene of a crowd gathered around a gangland shooting, for $23,000 in 1994. That’s still the top price for a single Weegee. But in January Nancy Lieberman, head of Phillips Auctioneers’ photo department, made a killing on Weegees when she sold a collection of 175 prints for $300,000.

“This is not about a morbid sense of violence or voyeurism,” argues Lieberman. “It is about elevating low material to a higher level and, like the TV show The Sopranos, turning underground aspects of our culture into art.” It’s also not a half-bad racket.